Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Chunking, a familiar idea in cognitive science, has recently been formalized by Servan- Schreiber and Anderson (in press) into a theory of perception and learning, and it successfully simulated the human acquisition of an artificial grammar through the simple memorization of exemplar sentences. In this article I briefly present the theory, called Competitive Chunking, or CC, as it has been extended to deal with the task of encoding random dot patterns. I explain how C C can be applied to the classic task of classifying such patterns into multiple categories, and report a successful simulation of data collected by Knapp and Anderson (1984). The tentative conclusion is that people seem to process dot patterns and artificial grammars in the same way, and that chunking is an important part of that process.